Coming Online Soon: The Five-Minute ‘Charlie’s Angels’

The question probably never occurred to viewers in the 1970s and 1980s, but suddenly it is highly relevant: exactly how much worthwhile entertainment content was there in shows like “Charlie’s Angels,” “T. J. Hooker,” and “Starsky and Hutch”?

The Sony Corporation and its production studio, Sony Pictures Television, which controls the rights to those and many other relics of a distant era of television, have come up with an answer to that question: three and a half to five minutes.

That’s the length Sony has shrunk episodes down to in order to create what the company hopes is an appealing new business in retooling old shows for a new era of entertainment. Sony even has a name for these shrunken slices of television nostalgia: minisodes.

Sony Television is planning in June to introduce an Internet-based service called the Minisode Network, initially offering the mini-shows for an exclusive run on MySpace. (The company may consider establishing a separate Internet channel called the Minisode Network later.)

However and wherever it appears, the network will consist of a lineup of tightly edited versions of shows lifted off the shelves of Sony’s television library. These are not clips of the shows, but actual episodes with beginnings, middles and ends, all told in under six minutes.

As Steve Mosko, the president of Sony Television, described it, “So in ‘Charlie Angels,’ they have a meeting, Charlie’s on the intercom telling them what the assignment is, there’s a couple of fights, and then a chase, and they catch the bad guy. Then they’re back home wrapping it up.”

“T. J. Hooker,” an especially formulaic cop show from the early 1980s, can be seen in short bursts of action as William Shatner interrogates suspects, fires shots and chases bad guys. “Shatner is just hilarious,” Mr. Mosko said.

That sums up the main aim of the minisodes. Nobody expects these shows to captivate anyone with their exciting plotlines, writing or ageless acting. “It’s really campy and fun,” Mr. Mosko said.

What he would like it to be as well is lucrative. Like other holders of vast libraries of filmed entertainment, Sony Television has been seeking ways to squeeze new value out of old assets.

Photo

In the 70s , Kate Jackson, left, Farrah Fawcett and Jaclyn Smith took an hour to solve a crime. Now, in minisodes, they do it in minutes.Credit
Columbia Pictures Television

“We’ve been looking for a legitimate way to make money from our library,” Mr. Mosko said. “Something that could bring new life to shows that have been on the shelf for awhile.”

The idea for condensed editions of these classic shows sprang from a casual conversation over a year ago between Mr. Mosko and another Sony Television executive, John Weiser, the head of distribution. They had noticed that an increasing number of people liked watching snippets of entertainment on Web sites like YouTube, rather than entire shows. The two Sony executives were aware that Viacom had been successful foraging through old libraries of shows on its cable channels like TV Land and Nick at Nite.

“Take classic shows and, rather than try to jam them into the digital world, look at what the consumer wants,” Mr. Mosko said. The plan gained even more traction when Sony executives saw the “Seven-Minute Sopranos,” a condensation of the 77-hour HBO series that was posted on YouTube in March.

One advantage Sony Television holds over a channel like TV Land is that the company holds the rights for all the shows it will use on the Minisode Network. TV Land must license all the shows it runs.

Clips from shows do appear on the TV Land Web site, as do, occasionally, some full-length episodes. But often, according to the network, the license deals for TV Land do not include the kind of extensive digital rights that would allow wide use of the episodes on the Internet.

So while you can go on the TV Land site and see the famous clip from “I Love Lucy” of Lucy and Ethel trying to keep up with the conveyer belt at the candy factory, you cannot see that whole episode — or even a condensed version of it.

Mr. Mosko said Sony had gone through all the proper channels to make sure it covered all the rights associated with editing the shows this way and posting them as episodes on the Internet. “We have all the credits on every episode,” Mr. Mosko said.

“There are no expensive costs,” Mr. Mosko said. “It’s just editing. Our people are really having fun with this. We’re not overthinking the process. You could almost look at this and say a group of college kids put this together.”

The hourlong action shows at Sony’s disposal proved especially easy to edit down, Mr. Mosko said. Comedies have proved slightly harder to condense, he said, because certain jokes have setups and reference points that must be included for the jokes to make sense.

Sony is even making a mini-version of “Ricki Lake,” one of its syndicated talk shows. “It’s great,” Mr. Mosko said. “The people get introduced, there’s a big fight, then they come together, and cry and hug. You get everything in five minutes.”

Correction: May 4, 2007

A picture caption in Business Day on Monday with an article about plans to condense versions of “Charlie’s Angels” into three-and-a-half- to five-minute episodes misstated the length of the original program, including one episode in which the cast was shown solving a crime. The program was 60 minutes, not 30.

A version of this article appears in print on , on page C4 of the New York edition with the headline: Coming Online Soon: The Five-Minute ‘Charlie’s Angels’. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe